You’ve seen plenty of blog posts about social media—Twitter and Facebook and MySpace. But which is the best for businesses or business professionals? You probably know about it already—LinkedIn. According to a recent poll, LinkedIn is the most favored by business people at 39%, compared with Facebook in 2nd at 26% and Twitter snagging 3rd at 19%. While this stat may not seem too surprising, the implications are very important. While Twitter and Facebook are important for keeping a pulse on customers, contacting colleagues and other business peers is best suited through LinkedIn.
With LinkedIn, you tend to stay current with the contacts inside your industry. In contrast, Twitter allows for a constant stream of information from everyone you know. Twitter isn’t focused in the same way LinkedIn is unless you have all the tools to sort through the data. Even if you do have the right tools, you may miss some important information, regarding events in your industry, etc. In short, LinkedIn keeps you in touch more consistently with your industry.
One of the key features of LinkedIn is finding relevant new contacts through your existing contacts. It is always easier to be introduced to someone rather than cold calling; it feels much more natural for someone to give you an in rather than trying to make one. In Twitter and Facebook, another person’s friends are just there. Sure, you can request that your friend introduce you to the other, but sometimes that “friend” doesn’t know you very well, or sometimes he doesn’t personallyknow who he’s following either. So wading through the list of followers to find pertinent contacts is laborious if you want contact with a particular person.
For instance, I can ask a specific person in LinkedIn to connect me with Michael who works at Alo Marketing because I want to talk to him about forming a partnership with branding website. How would I go about doing that in other mediums? In Twitter, I don’t know who works in Marketing in Alo; I only know I like the company’s work. So it becomes very difficult then to get anything done in any of the other mediums unless I know someone else knows Michael.
While you should not ignore Twitter and Facebook to meet new people, you should get into LinkedIn if you aren’t or become more involved with it if you are. After all, it is made by business people for business people.
